// creative //
Spring 2016
Wake Up, Michael
AJ Stoughton
It pays $55,000, plus three weeks of vacation, plus five sick days. I wouldn’t be rich but I’d be comfortable. Especially for someone just coming out of school. I have friends who are getting high 20’s, low 30’s. If I’m going to stay in New York, this is the way to do it.
That’s the pitch. I repeat it to myself as I head to the restaurant to meet my parents, and as I do, it becomes more comfortable. It makes me feel grown up to acknowledge the economic realities of the post-college world. How do I keep the Met in my life? The MoMA, the Yankees, and Liebman’s? Riverside Park? You can have your life of the mind but then there needs to be Life that goes with it. And that costs money.
I tell myself to repeat the pitch until I’m convinced that this is the right thing to do, but I already am. If I weren’t, I’d be planning my great escape to the country. I, the college poet, winner of countless student prizes, would go off to my little shack in podunk nowhere and write my books. I’d work at a diner or a gas station to pay the bills, and when I came home, I would sit at my computer and write my great work. Or maybe I would jetset, and play the bohemian across continental Europe, composing poetry on the back of receipts and cocktail napkins. But I know the cost of things. I know what it takes to live a certain kind of life, and it makes sense to do this.
Your grandfather would be so proud, she’ll say, and I’ll say, I know. I’m doing the same exact thing that you did coming out of college. Something tells me that was not the immigrant dream. Then again, neither was returning to Europe, or moving into the middle of white bread America to write stories about disaffected Jewish boys back on the coast. Which would be the bigger betrayal, to stay still, and live out the life of my parents or to turn backwards into the mouth of poverty, of struggle?
Papa would weep if he were alive today. Maybe that’s what I would say. Would that even be true? He wasn’t exactly the most observant, according to my mother, but there is more to a Jew than a kosher kitchen and a quiet sabbath. Secular or not, he had something that she doesn’t have, and I don’t have it either.
I don’t think she’ll even think about which is “the right” choice. What makes you happy? What do you want to do? How do you feel? How about, what is the path that’s going to let you lead a Jewish life? What’s the path that’s going to lead you to the next step for our family? How are you going to preserve the things you came here with? All the questions she never asked herself. Has she learned enough since then to ask them of her son? 55,000. Three weeks. Five days. Those are the kind of numbers that would make my grandpa smile. All I have to do is say yes.
But I don’t.
I tell my mother I am turning down the job, and she hardly reacts.
Good, she says. You wouldn’t have liked it anyway.
I wait to see if there is more. We haven’t even ordered yet, and the waiters are frantic around us, pouring water and placing bread and oil in the middle of the table. We wait for them to finish, and when they do, she still says nothing. I am going to be a famous writer, I say, searching for an answer. A bohemian. I’m gonna get mange and write poems for spare change on the subway platform. I look her in the eye, and she looks back at me. All she says is: good.
Good. She says it without malice. She says it so sincerely. Good.
Do you know what this means, I want to say to her. Your son isn’t going to have a career. He’s not going to have money or comfort or ease. Your son is going to struggle for the rest of his life—doing something he may not even be good at! But she doesn’t seem to see it that way. I think she has fooled herself into thinking that this path can somehow lead me to the life that she’s had. I don’t think she realizes that I’m throwing away a hundred years’ worth of immigrant progress. But maybe she does. And that makes me sad. As graduation approaches, I think more and more about my quiet Sundays on the patio reading with them: the meals together, the tickets, the security—the sense, as corny as it might sound, that our lives were in some way uniquely blessed to be better than the rest of the world’s. Does she value that so little that she’s willing to watch me throw it away? Me, her only son?
And I’m not going to get married! I don’t want the tyranny of your bourgeois life and I don’t want the tyranny of some woman telling me where to be and when. But I know already what she’d say.
That’s your right. And things change.
But things don’t. A month later it’s Pesach, I am already on the next train back by the time I get the email.
Michael, you do not storm out of MY house. Everyone was so excited to see you. I made food for you, and now what? What are we going to do with the leftovers if you’re not taking them? It’s all just so dramatic. You have never before taken this kind of thing seriously. Hillel? You’re going to walk out on my Seder to go to one at the Hillel? I’ve been the one encouraging you to go there since you first got to college! Have you ever even been there before? It’s going to be over by the time you even get to Harlem.
Maybe you think I’m some kind of traitor to the race (watch that thinking kiddo, it will burn you), but I’m not doing anything that hasn’t always been done in this family. You don’t hear a word out of your sister or your father or your cousins. We have never done an observant Seder, and I don’t know why you expected that to change out of the blue. We are what we are. If you want to be something else, that can be arranged. I’ll buy you a plane ticket tonight and you can spend the rest of your life knocking your head against a wall in Jerusalem.
There’s more, but I stop reading and hit reply.
I really didn’t mean any offense by leaving. I was just embarrassed, and I thought it would be less shameful to just leave than to tell you how disappointed I was in front of all those people. Don’t you remember the conversation we had in the car a few months ago? In December? I told you I wanted to have a serious Seder this year, and you said we would. Then I show up and there’s bacon in the brisket. We barely say a prayer over the wine. First, this is about God and I have a right to be upset. Even after that, though, what is so wrong about what I’m asking? I just wanted us to take some pride in our Jewish home for once. I wanted us to do something to bring a little tradition in our lives. For once I didn’t want to feel embarrassed about the shitty kind of Jews we are, the do-nothing-pick-and-choose Jews. Should I have said that in front of our extended family? Should I have said publicly how much you let me down?
I’m not sure what it was I ruined in the first place. I see my parents every other week, and our cousins only live two towns away. I don’t even think my parents like them that much. He’s so quiet. She’s just a cold bitch. That was the refrain from my mother’s mouth after almost every family get-together, and without the kids there, it’s even worse. While my dad and I talked about sports, she would be left entertaining her milquetoast brother and his shiksa wife.
A few family friends also came by and I’m sure mom wasn’t happy about having to explain to them why her only child just stormed out of his last Seder at home. He’s just going through a phase right now. Can you imagine? Is there anything more condescending than that? It’s not childish to want to take things seriously. Believing in tradition isn’t immature. What else is there to hold a family together? Love, I suppose. Love can be enough for parents and children, but what else is there to make the center hold once you get out into the outer branches of the family tree? Maybe our cousins are bores, but would they be so bad if more than one of us knew how to say a bracha without looking at a transliterated haggadah?
That’s why the Hillel makes sense to me. That’s why it doesn’t matter that I’ve never been there before. I may not know their names, but the people there won’t be strangers. We want the same things, we say the same prayers. A building full of Jews is more of a home than some gabled house in Scarsdale with a piano in the parlor, regardless of whether my parents live there or not. I can’t call home a household that hides its shofar in the basement like a leaf blower, that treats a Seder plate like a clock, or a sculpture—never to be touched, to be mentioned.
I didn’t ruin anything except a nice quiet meal between some people who happen to know each other. There was nothing Jewish about that dinner, or that house. Just a vague sense of obligation surrounding everything, of ritual without thought. The whole point of these holidays, these traditions, is mindfulness. To eat without thought it is to be an animal. That’s how dogs live—coming to the bowl and eating, assuming the food will always be there.
I even said that once to an ex-girlfriend of mine, over the winter, or at least something to that effect. She had her mother’s house for the weekend and we, about thirty to forty of us, came over and drank beer and liquor in the freezing driveway outside, using her mother’s finest stemware. She, the ardent yet demure anti-Zionist and consummate leftist saint, and I, the artistically inclined master of apolitics, both drunk, talked beneath the basketball hoop across from her garage about the state of American Jewish affairs.
Safety is fundamentally good, I say. And anyone who doesn’t think so doesn’t understand the true nature of violence. But that doesn’t mean everything about safety is good, and the biggest drawback is that we’ve given ourselves up for the great safety of whiteness.
Why is that a bad thing, though? She asks this as though she doesn’t already have an answer, and takes a pause for effect. Our ancestors spent generations trying to be accepted. It seems silly to me to cling to your Jewishness because you don’t like being white. You’re white. Deal with it. It’s going to be okay.
It’s going to be okay. Well, yes. That’s the problem. As I ride this train now, I will ride this train at fifty, if I’m not careful. As will she. As will all of us. If we’re going to be so safe, the least we can do is be uncomfortable about it. Unless of course someone thinks that there’s any joy left to be found in the achievement of a monthly Metro North ticket and a parking pass at the train station for the Audi.
There used to be joy, certainly. My grandparents’ bungalow at the Rockaways. Their Rego Park apartment. Their trips to the Catskills. These were causes for true celebration, especially in the wake of the Shoah. Forget American anti-Semitism—their success was a finger in the face of the whole world.
Those things only meant something because we weren’t white. Who doesn’t see that? The money never mattered. The houses never mattered. It was about building Jewish lives, solidifying a space for ourselves to live as we wanted to, in perpetuity, as Jews. What’s the point of security if there’s no life to live in safety?
You’re right Mom, I shouldn’t have walked out. I’m sorry for not staying and saying what I wanted to say. But I guess it’s better late than never: sometimes when I’m alone I think about the tapes we have of you all first moving into the house. There was so much aspiration, and joy, and hope in that move-in. It’s like a chapter out of the best Roth, like our own little Newark. Where did all that joy go? If the point in coming out to the suburbs was to hide yourselves, then I guess that’s my answer. Can’t you see this is all a big lie? That we got cheated? We gave ourselves up for 18 holes on Sunday mornings. Forget Westchester. Go back to Brooklyn, to Queens, to the Bronx. See if you can find that happiness there, if you even miss it.
Honestly I’m happy that you’re happy I didn’t take the job. Even if you weren’t, I’d turn it down in a heartbeat. If the choice is between what you have and the poverty of the written word, I’ll take the word.
I hit send and turn my phone off. I feel unconvinced by my words. You have failed to make a Jewish home, so I will eschew the home entirely. Meanwhile, behold as global Jewry flickers off the horizon, floating past the terminal point of our vision. There are still six stops before I get to Harlem.
When I get back to my dorm, I go straight to my room. I can tell that everyone has gone to sleep. It’s late, and there’s no more idle chatter from the common room. The suite is silent, save the voices of a young Dustin Hoffman, and a middle-aged William Daniels coming tinny and thin from my laptop. The Graduate is, for me, like returning to a favorite picture book. I hardly even watch it anymore when I put it on. I just listen for the voices. Sometimes I just look at the screen to see Dustin Hoffman’s face, nervous and ethnic. Ben had the right idea. What kinds of Jews live in California anyway? Who is California’s Bellow, Allen, Roth? Is it even possible to walk on Shabbos in a town like Pasadena?
I feel the urge to open a new tab and send a new email to my mother. What are people like me supposed to do? You were the ones who had the opportunity to do something new. Now there’s nothing to do except rinse and repeat or break the machine. I just want you to realize how good you had it. Don’t you realize how lucky you were for all those upper middle class things to be exciting? I can never do what you have done. You built. I would just follow. That’s not our story. But of course I don’t send this. I don’t even write it out.
As I fall asleep, I stare at Ben all decked in his scuba suit. I see, as my vision narrows, the world as he sees it, full of fluid blues and the deformations of people. I hear the muted tones of speech, and begin to feel my eyes close when I hear what I think is a knock at the door.
Thuck.
Thuck.
I wait for a moment in silence, but it seems only to be a dream, or the pipes banging in the walls. Then it comes again.
Thuck.
Thuck.
I wait again but hear nothing more.
"Hello?”
Thuck.
Thuck.
“Who is it?”
No one answers. I get up to look through the fisheye in the door, but there is no more knocking, only now the faint garble of company coming from the common room, as if I were stuck in the bathroom at a very large party. I lean my ear against the door and hear more clearly now the individual voices that make up the hum on its other side. I call again, “who is it?” Again, I look through the fisheye, but see nothing. The voices still come through the door like rain through a window left ajar—the droplets on the sill only hinting at the flood that could have come. Is it possible that I am on the wrong side of the door? Is it not the lightless hallway that I see but the obstruction of another eye, peering into my room, looking to see who it is? I’m tempted to laugh at the idea, even alone. But it’s not the craziest idea. It would be nice, in a way, to find that in my room I am just on the outside of some great mass of people waiting for me. Would it be so crazy to knock, even if no one is there? And so I do.
Thuck.
Thuck.
Silence. As expected. I decide to lean forward to look again one last time—to put the joke to rest—when suddenly the door swings away from me and my face is flushed with the light of a room that was not there before. I am not sure if I walk forward or if the doorway doesn’t just slide past me in space, and I find myself suddenly in the foyer of a house that looks just like the house I left just a few hours before. Our family heirlooms rest on the grand piano in the parlor: a shofar the color of fudge left to sit on the kitchen counter, a Seder plate that my parents bought in the Catskills, and a set of china from my grandmother’s apartment. Below me there’s a Persian rug whose tassels have begun to dread themselves under the pressure of passing feet and gnawing vacuums. In its faded pattern, I see the frames of images without any images. The design has been rubbed away like a grease stain.
Past the piano in the parlor, I see a throng of people—my family, including my mother—and a number of strangers. I see a beautiful woman in her late twenties, an old man in black with a long gray beard and skin like the cover of a leather-bound book. And at the center of all of them is a thing I cannot see, but hear.
He’s here! The crowd turns to look at me and almost immediately someone is helping me with my coat. Another is taking a briefcase from me and my mother is reaching up to try and hold me by the face. I can feel her age in her lips.
I’m sorry I walked out. And about the email, too. The words come out awkwardly, as though I am spitting food into a napkin. I say it more as a formality than anything else, but she doesn’t seem to hear me, or if she does, she doesn’t acknowledge it. As these people move in a great whirlwind around me, I look back through the door, which now leads nowhere. A wall of slate, black, fills the threshold, and as I reach towards it, I see the color fade from my body and I become translucent.
No delays on your trip up? How were the subways?
Sarah tells us you’ve been talking about moving back up here, or maybe getting a nice little house out here or in Riverdale. Please tell me you’re considering Connecticut.
And you’re happy with the new job? They tell me you have your own office, that the firm’s gotten you a membership at Elmwood. That true? You should see if they can get you in somewhere in Rye with the beaches. So what if it’s Rye.
They’re saying ’86 is gonna be a good year, yes.
I pull my hand away from the door and feel myself return to the world. I try, through their questions, to glean the answers I’m supposed to have. I hear, meanwhile, the sound of crying. The people in the other room shush and coo. From the back of the crowd, my mother’s father walks towards me and puts a hand on my shoulder. Even in his old age, he is bigger than me. He wears a large blue sweater the color of the Atlantic, and khakis two sizes too big in the thigh.
It’s nice to finally meet you, I say, and he shakes his head.
You misunderstand. Without a word he takes me from the crowd, and brings me into the living room with the man in black and the rest of our guests. This is who you are meeting, he says, and points to the center of our gathered group. In the arms of this beautiful woman was a baby no more than a week old.
Hi honey. My new wife.
Baby Isaac, my grandfather declares.
Baby Isaac, I parrot back.
Come, things are about to start. The people around me move as though they have rehearsed while waiting for me—and how long has that been? How does the past wait for somebody? Is it still until you come to meet it, at which it starts to churn and twist into life? Or does the past move without you, forming its own world that spins along even after you’ve left it? Cousins stand with cousins, parents with parents, strangers with strangers (in-laws?), and I, with my grandfather, on the periphery. Now that things have begun I get the strong sense that I am somehow invisible to all these people around me. I am just an audience member in a show that they have been waiting to perform.
You know where you are don’t you?
Yes. Well, I think.
A bris is a wonderful thing.
I’m glad you think so.
Why wouldn’t I?
Mom always said that you didn’t care for this type of thing.
Nonsense. This is all there is, in the end. What are you once you lose this? He waved his hand back and forth in the air to indicate nothing.
I have to ask. Does the mohel still put his mouth on the penis nowadays?
It’s fantasy, Michael. You don’t have to worry about things like that.
A fantasy? Not a dream?
Who can tell?
The mohel chants something and calls me and my wife over to him.
And what is the child’s name?
Isaac, my wife says, warmly.
Isaac Yigal Ben Aaron!
The rabbi says another chant and takes up his scalpel. The baby wails and the crowd tuts and awwws in sympathy. When the mohel is finished, my mother hoists the baby and brings him to me.
Little baby Isaac, she says, almost singing.
Isaac, I say, looking at him. His face is mine! Even at so young an age the resemblance is uncanny. Isaac, Isaac, Isaac. I take him in my arms. It’s like holding a football, I laugh, and they laugh back. He is still crying.
You are truly one of us now, tateleh. How does it feel?
He was always one of us. He didn’t need a bris to make him a Jew.
No, but it helps.
Yes, yes, it helps.
Isaac.
I can’t get enough of that name. This is the kind of name I want, for myself, for my son. This is the kind of thing that makes adult life worth living. Not just having children, but bringing them into a world larger than the family. Our clan is an institution, a branch in a tree far more profound than any he would climb in our backyard; that’s quite a lesson to learn before you can even speak.
My mother stands next to me as I hold my new son. This was once yours, I say. Look at the food in the kitchen. Look at the Seder plate on the piano. This could have been our home. I mean it was our home. But listen to this name. Look at that man with his beard like steel wool. Why did you want us to turn away from all this?
My mother again says nothing. She sits me down on the couch at the center of the room and my horde of new aunts and cousins come round one by one to offer their congratulations and offer their finger for my son to hold. As she leaves she turns to me, fixing her apron before she prepares to go back to the kitchen.
You two are such a blessing. We are so lucky. There again is her trademark sincerity. This time I don’t mind it. In fact I love it, so much so that I feel the urge to chase after her and ask her to say it again. But I am ensnared in the great web of my new family and I find myself stuck to the couch, beset by questions.
When do you have to go back?
Is there a train soon? Will you have to get going?
Aren’t you supposed to be off jetting around the world?
Our great famous writer!
It’s going to be months until you see him! He’s going to have grown so much.
Famous writer? What do you mean famous writer?
Well relatively speaking, darling. There are no “famous” writers. You know that.
What about my office, though? The membership? I’m looking for a house? Again they say nothing and Isaac begins to squirm in my arms. Didn’t you hear what they said when I came in? My heart feels as though it is choking itself as it begins to beat faster. I’m the big family success.
They all laugh and Isaac begins to cry.
Let your wife take him. My grandfather is standing over me now, staring at me from behind the couch. I hand the baby off to her and my grandfather takes me to get a glass of wine from the kitchen. The pieces of crystalware he brings us look like bowls on stilts, and the wine sloshes in their wide mouths as he walks one over to me. His lips are already the color of eggplant, and he gives a quiet l’chaim.
Are they right? I thought I was some kind of businessman. I’m a writer?
Why do you have to just be one or the other?
But what do I do for a living? Do I really write? And I can still have all this?
Is there any part of you that believes that’s really possible? His face is, in spite of the lips, sober, almost defeated, as though I have committed some great failure of imagination.
Well it’s nice to see you.
I’m flattered you took the time. The details seem off, though. My voice was never this deep.
I just imagined it would be.
Well now it is so. And you’re our big businessman.
I never thought that would happen.
There was a time when you thought that it might.
I shrugged.
But now you’ve got it all.
Is that sarcastic?
He shrugged back.
What’s sarcastic? You’ve got that beautiful wife in there. You’ve got that son who I’m sure you’re going to make into a little yeshiva bocher. You’re going to have a big house. You’ve done the impossible. You’ve returned to the past and made it new. What’s sarcastic?
You know everyone else seems happy for me. Why are you fighting me?
Who’s fighting, Michael? You get the final say here.
Have you ever seen Mom so happy with me?
Your mother is always happy with you.
Not so.
You don’t understand what happiness means for a parent so of course you think “not so.”
You don’t think she’s happy I finally made this choice? How could it make anybody happy to see a son throw all your work away? And it’s your work too. All the attempts to assimilate, to make it, to be comfortable. Are you telling me it would make you glad to see me throw it away?
She’s happy when you make a choice. She never made any choices. I never made any choices. The only choice anyone ever made was my father’s choice to leave Russia. And trust me that wasn’t much of a choice either. The only work anyone ever did was to get to the point where somebody could make a choice. You really think you’re making her happy if you pass that decision down the line?
So you’re saying I’m not allowed to want this?
You can want whatever you’d like if you decide it’s what’s best. I just don’t understand why you’d come back here. All the places in the world—in your mind!—and this is the best you can do? I guess I was just hoping you’d want more than this. Don’t you want to think a little bit bigger?
So you’re telling me I should stop? That I should cancel the show and go back to my bed, to the years I’ve laid out for myself, the poverty, the uncertainty?
Son, no one’s telling you anything. That’s what I’m telling you. It’s time to grow up.
When I wake up, the movie’s credits are rolling at the topmost corner of the screen. In fifteen seconds a new movie will start. Outside the window, the sun is at an indeterminable position. Light creeps in through the window, ambiguous, either nascent dawn or urban glow. I do not try to find it out which. I do not look at the clock. I look at my wall without focusing on anything, including the wall. For a moment, I am nothing more than a set of eyes looking: I am the bare minimum of a person, looking without thought, seeing without memory, half asleep in the early hours of the Sabbath.
That’s the pitch. I repeat it to myself as I head to the restaurant to meet my parents, and as I do, it becomes more comfortable. It makes me feel grown up to acknowledge the economic realities of the post-college world. How do I keep the Met in my life? The MoMA, the Yankees, and Liebman’s? Riverside Park? You can have your life of the mind but then there needs to be Life that goes with it. And that costs money.
I tell myself to repeat the pitch until I’m convinced that this is the right thing to do, but I already am. If I weren’t, I’d be planning my great escape to the country. I, the college poet, winner of countless student prizes, would go off to my little shack in podunk nowhere and write my books. I’d work at a diner or a gas station to pay the bills, and when I came home, I would sit at my computer and write my great work. Or maybe I would jetset, and play the bohemian across continental Europe, composing poetry on the back of receipts and cocktail napkins. But I know the cost of things. I know what it takes to live a certain kind of life, and it makes sense to do this.
Your grandfather would be so proud, she’ll say, and I’ll say, I know. I’m doing the same exact thing that you did coming out of college. Something tells me that was not the immigrant dream. Then again, neither was returning to Europe, or moving into the middle of white bread America to write stories about disaffected Jewish boys back on the coast. Which would be the bigger betrayal, to stay still, and live out the life of my parents or to turn backwards into the mouth of poverty, of struggle?
Papa would weep if he were alive today. Maybe that’s what I would say. Would that even be true? He wasn’t exactly the most observant, according to my mother, but there is more to a Jew than a kosher kitchen and a quiet sabbath. Secular or not, he had something that she doesn’t have, and I don’t have it either.
I don’t think she’ll even think about which is “the right” choice. What makes you happy? What do you want to do? How do you feel? How about, what is the path that’s going to let you lead a Jewish life? What’s the path that’s going to lead you to the next step for our family? How are you going to preserve the things you came here with? All the questions she never asked herself. Has she learned enough since then to ask them of her son? 55,000. Three weeks. Five days. Those are the kind of numbers that would make my grandpa smile. All I have to do is say yes.
But I don’t.
I tell my mother I am turning down the job, and she hardly reacts.
Good, she says. You wouldn’t have liked it anyway.
I wait to see if there is more. We haven’t even ordered yet, and the waiters are frantic around us, pouring water and placing bread and oil in the middle of the table. We wait for them to finish, and when they do, she still says nothing. I am going to be a famous writer, I say, searching for an answer. A bohemian. I’m gonna get mange and write poems for spare change on the subway platform. I look her in the eye, and she looks back at me. All she says is: good.
Good. She says it without malice. She says it so sincerely. Good.
Do you know what this means, I want to say to her. Your son isn’t going to have a career. He’s not going to have money or comfort or ease. Your son is going to struggle for the rest of his life—doing something he may not even be good at! But she doesn’t seem to see it that way. I think she has fooled herself into thinking that this path can somehow lead me to the life that she’s had. I don’t think she realizes that I’m throwing away a hundred years’ worth of immigrant progress. But maybe she does. And that makes me sad. As graduation approaches, I think more and more about my quiet Sundays on the patio reading with them: the meals together, the tickets, the security—the sense, as corny as it might sound, that our lives were in some way uniquely blessed to be better than the rest of the world’s. Does she value that so little that she’s willing to watch me throw it away? Me, her only son?
And I’m not going to get married! I don’t want the tyranny of your bourgeois life and I don’t want the tyranny of some woman telling me where to be and when. But I know already what she’d say.
That’s your right. And things change.
But things don’t. A month later it’s Pesach, I am already on the next train back by the time I get the email.
Michael, you do not storm out of MY house. Everyone was so excited to see you. I made food for you, and now what? What are we going to do with the leftovers if you’re not taking them? It’s all just so dramatic. You have never before taken this kind of thing seriously. Hillel? You’re going to walk out on my Seder to go to one at the Hillel? I’ve been the one encouraging you to go there since you first got to college! Have you ever even been there before? It’s going to be over by the time you even get to Harlem.
Maybe you think I’m some kind of traitor to the race (watch that thinking kiddo, it will burn you), but I’m not doing anything that hasn’t always been done in this family. You don’t hear a word out of your sister or your father or your cousins. We have never done an observant Seder, and I don’t know why you expected that to change out of the blue. We are what we are. If you want to be something else, that can be arranged. I’ll buy you a plane ticket tonight and you can spend the rest of your life knocking your head against a wall in Jerusalem.
There’s more, but I stop reading and hit reply.
I really didn’t mean any offense by leaving. I was just embarrassed, and I thought it would be less shameful to just leave than to tell you how disappointed I was in front of all those people. Don’t you remember the conversation we had in the car a few months ago? In December? I told you I wanted to have a serious Seder this year, and you said we would. Then I show up and there’s bacon in the brisket. We barely say a prayer over the wine. First, this is about God and I have a right to be upset. Even after that, though, what is so wrong about what I’m asking? I just wanted us to take some pride in our Jewish home for once. I wanted us to do something to bring a little tradition in our lives. For once I didn’t want to feel embarrassed about the shitty kind of Jews we are, the do-nothing-pick-and-choose Jews. Should I have said that in front of our extended family? Should I have said publicly how much you let me down?
I’m not sure what it was I ruined in the first place. I see my parents every other week, and our cousins only live two towns away. I don’t even think my parents like them that much. He’s so quiet. She’s just a cold bitch. That was the refrain from my mother’s mouth after almost every family get-together, and without the kids there, it’s even worse. While my dad and I talked about sports, she would be left entertaining her milquetoast brother and his shiksa wife.
A few family friends also came by and I’m sure mom wasn’t happy about having to explain to them why her only child just stormed out of his last Seder at home. He’s just going through a phase right now. Can you imagine? Is there anything more condescending than that? It’s not childish to want to take things seriously. Believing in tradition isn’t immature. What else is there to hold a family together? Love, I suppose. Love can be enough for parents and children, but what else is there to make the center hold once you get out into the outer branches of the family tree? Maybe our cousins are bores, but would they be so bad if more than one of us knew how to say a bracha without looking at a transliterated haggadah?
That’s why the Hillel makes sense to me. That’s why it doesn’t matter that I’ve never been there before. I may not know their names, but the people there won’t be strangers. We want the same things, we say the same prayers. A building full of Jews is more of a home than some gabled house in Scarsdale with a piano in the parlor, regardless of whether my parents live there or not. I can’t call home a household that hides its shofar in the basement like a leaf blower, that treats a Seder plate like a clock, or a sculpture—never to be touched, to be mentioned.
I didn’t ruin anything except a nice quiet meal between some people who happen to know each other. There was nothing Jewish about that dinner, or that house. Just a vague sense of obligation surrounding everything, of ritual without thought. The whole point of these holidays, these traditions, is mindfulness. To eat without thought it is to be an animal. That’s how dogs live—coming to the bowl and eating, assuming the food will always be there.
I even said that once to an ex-girlfriend of mine, over the winter, or at least something to that effect. She had her mother’s house for the weekend and we, about thirty to forty of us, came over and drank beer and liquor in the freezing driveway outside, using her mother’s finest stemware. She, the ardent yet demure anti-Zionist and consummate leftist saint, and I, the artistically inclined master of apolitics, both drunk, talked beneath the basketball hoop across from her garage about the state of American Jewish affairs.
Safety is fundamentally good, I say. And anyone who doesn’t think so doesn’t understand the true nature of violence. But that doesn’t mean everything about safety is good, and the biggest drawback is that we’ve given ourselves up for the great safety of whiteness.
Why is that a bad thing, though? She asks this as though she doesn’t already have an answer, and takes a pause for effect. Our ancestors spent generations trying to be accepted. It seems silly to me to cling to your Jewishness because you don’t like being white. You’re white. Deal with it. It’s going to be okay.
It’s going to be okay. Well, yes. That’s the problem. As I ride this train now, I will ride this train at fifty, if I’m not careful. As will she. As will all of us. If we’re going to be so safe, the least we can do is be uncomfortable about it. Unless of course someone thinks that there’s any joy left to be found in the achievement of a monthly Metro North ticket and a parking pass at the train station for the Audi.
There used to be joy, certainly. My grandparents’ bungalow at the Rockaways. Their Rego Park apartment. Their trips to the Catskills. These were causes for true celebration, especially in the wake of the Shoah. Forget American anti-Semitism—their success was a finger in the face of the whole world.
Those things only meant something because we weren’t white. Who doesn’t see that? The money never mattered. The houses never mattered. It was about building Jewish lives, solidifying a space for ourselves to live as we wanted to, in perpetuity, as Jews. What’s the point of security if there’s no life to live in safety?
You’re right Mom, I shouldn’t have walked out. I’m sorry for not staying and saying what I wanted to say. But I guess it’s better late than never: sometimes when I’m alone I think about the tapes we have of you all first moving into the house. There was so much aspiration, and joy, and hope in that move-in. It’s like a chapter out of the best Roth, like our own little Newark. Where did all that joy go? If the point in coming out to the suburbs was to hide yourselves, then I guess that’s my answer. Can’t you see this is all a big lie? That we got cheated? We gave ourselves up for 18 holes on Sunday mornings. Forget Westchester. Go back to Brooklyn, to Queens, to the Bronx. See if you can find that happiness there, if you even miss it.
Honestly I’m happy that you’re happy I didn’t take the job. Even if you weren’t, I’d turn it down in a heartbeat. If the choice is between what you have and the poverty of the written word, I’ll take the word.
I hit send and turn my phone off. I feel unconvinced by my words. You have failed to make a Jewish home, so I will eschew the home entirely. Meanwhile, behold as global Jewry flickers off the horizon, floating past the terminal point of our vision. There are still six stops before I get to Harlem.
When I get back to my dorm, I go straight to my room. I can tell that everyone has gone to sleep. It’s late, and there’s no more idle chatter from the common room. The suite is silent, save the voices of a young Dustin Hoffman, and a middle-aged William Daniels coming tinny and thin from my laptop. The Graduate is, for me, like returning to a favorite picture book. I hardly even watch it anymore when I put it on. I just listen for the voices. Sometimes I just look at the screen to see Dustin Hoffman’s face, nervous and ethnic. Ben had the right idea. What kinds of Jews live in California anyway? Who is California’s Bellow, Allen, Roth? Is it even possible to walk on Shabbos in a town like Pasadena?
I feel the urge to open a new tab and send a new email to my mother. What are people like me supposed to do? You were the ones who had the opportunity to do something new. Now there’s nothing to do except rinse and repeat or break the machine. I just want you to realize how good you had it. Don’t you realize how lucky you were for all those upper middle class things to be exciting? I can never do what you have done. You built. I would just follow. That’s not our story. But of course I don’t send this. I don’t even write it out.
As I fall asleep, I stare at Ben all decked in his scuba suit. I see, as my vision narrows, the world as he sees it, full of fluid blues and the deformations of people. I hear the muted tones of speech, and begin to feel my eyes close when I hear what I think is a knock at the door.
Thuck.
Thuck.
I wait for a moment in silence, but it seems only to be a dream, or the pipes banging in the walls. Then it comes again.
Thuck.
Thuck.
I wait again but hear nothing more.
"Hello?”
Thuck.
Thuck.
“Who is it?”
No one answers. I get up to look through the fisheye in the door, but there is no more knocking, only now the faint garble of company coming from the common room, as if I were stuck in the bathroom at a very large party. I lean my ear against the door and hear more clearly now the individual voices that make up the hum on its other side. I call again, “who is it?” Again, I look through the fisheye, but see nothing. The voices still come through the door like rain through a window left ajar—the droplets on the sill only hinting at the flood that could have come. Is it possible that I am on the wrong side of the door? Is it not the lightless hallway that I see but the obstruction of another eye, peering into my room, looking to see who it is? I’m tempted to laugh at the idea, even alone. But it’s not the craziest idea. It would be nice, in a way, to find that in my room I am just on the outside of some great mass of people waiting for me. Would it be so crazy to knock, even if no one is there? And so I do.
Thuck.
Thuck.
Silence. As expected. I decide to lean forward to look again one last time—to put the joke to rest—when suddenly the door swings away from me and my face is flushed with the light of a room that was not there before. I am not sure if I walk forward or if the doorway doesn’t just slide past me in space, and I find myself suddenly in the foyer of a house that looks just like the house I left just a few hours before. Our family heirlooms rest on the grand piano in the parlor: a shofar the color of fudge left to sit on the kitchen counter, a Seder plate that my parents bought in the Catskills, and a set of china from my grandmother’s apartment. Below me there’s a Persian rug whose tassels have begun to dread themselves under the pressure of passing feet and gnawing vacuums. In its faded pattern, I see the frames of images without any images. The design has been rubbed away like a grease stain.
Past the piano in the parlor, I see a throng of people—my family, including my mother—and a number of strangers. I see a beautiful woman in her late twenties, an old man in black with a long gray beard and skin like the cover of a leather-bound book. And at the center of all of them is a thing I cannot see, but hear.
He’s here! The crowd turns to look at me and almost immediately someone is helping me with my coat. Another is taking a briefcase from me and my mother is reaching up to try and hold me by the face. I can feel her age in her lips.
I’m sorry I walked out. And about the email, too. The words come out awkwardly, as though I am spitting food into a napkin. I say it more as a formality than anything else, but she doesn’t seem to hear me, or if she does, she doesn’t acknowledge it. As these people move in a great whirlwind around me, I look back through the door, which now leads nowhere. A wall of slate, black, fills the threshold, and as I reach towards it, I see the color fade from my body and I become translucent.
No delays on your trip up? How were the subways?
Sarah tells us you’ve been talking about moving back up here, or maybe getting a nice little house out here or in Riverdale. Please tell me you’re considering Connecticut.
And you’re happy with the new job? They tell me you have your own office, that the firm’s gotten you a membership at Elmwood. That true? You should see if they can get you in somewhere in Rye with the beaches. So what if it’s Rye.
They’re saying ’86 is gonna be a good year, yes.
I pull my hand away from the door and feel myself return to the world. I try, through their questions, to glean the answers I’m supposed to have. I hear, meanwhile, the sound of crying. The people in the other room shush and coo. From the back of the crowd, my mother’s father walks towards me and puts a hand on my shoulder. Even in his old age, he is bigger than me. He wears a large blue sweater the color of the Atlantic, and khakis two sizes too big in the thigh.
It’s nice to finally meet you, I say, and he shakes his head.
You misunderstand. Without a word he takes me from the crowd, and brings me into the living room with the man in black and the rest of our guests. This is who you are meeting, he says, and points to the center of our gathered group. In the arms of this beautiful woman was a baby no more than a week old.
Hi honey. My new wife.
Baby Isaac, my grandfather declares.
Baby Isaac, I parrot back.
Come, things are about to start. The people around me move as though they have rehearsed while waiting for me—and how long has that been? How does the past wait for somebody? Is it still until you come to meet it, at which it starts to churn and twist into life? Or does the past move without you, forming its own world that spins along even after you’ve left it? Cousins stand with cousins, parents with parents, strangers with strangers (in-laws?), and I, with my grandfather, on the periphery. Now that things have begun I get the strong sense that I am somehow invisible to all these people around me. I am just an audience member in a show that they have been waiting to perform.
You know where you are don’t you?
Yes. Well, I think.
A bris is a wonderful thing.
I’m glad you think so.
Why wouldn’t I?
Mom always said that you didn’t care for this type of thing.
Nonsense. This is all there is, in the end. What are you once you lose this? He waved his hand back and forth in the air to indicate nothing.
I have to ask. Does the mohel still put his mouth on the penis nowadays?
It’s fantasy, Michael. You don’t have to worry about things like that.
A fantasy? Not a dream?
Who can tell?
The mohel chants something and calls me and my wife over to him.
And what is the child’s name?
Isaac, my wife says, warmly.
Isaac Yigal Ben Aaron!
The rabbi says another chant and takes up his scalpel. The baby wails and the crowd tuts and awwws in sympathy. When the mohel is finished, my mother hoists the baby and brings him to me.
Little baby Isaac, she says, almost singing.
Isaac, I say, looking at him. His face is mine! Even at so young an age the resemblance is uncanny. Isaac, Isaac, Isaac. I take him in my arms. It’s like holding a football, I laugh, and they laugh back. He is still crying.
You are truly one of us now, tateleh. How does it feel?
He was always one of us. He didn’t need a bris to make him a Jew.
No, but it helps.
Yes, yes, it helps.
Isaac.
I can’t get enough of that name. This is the kind of name I want, for myself, for my son. This is the kind of thing that makes adult life worth living. Not just having children, but bringing them into a world larger than the family. Our clan is an institution, a branch in a tree far more profound than any he would climb in our backyard; that’s quite a lesson to learn before you can even speak.
My mother stands next to me as I hold my new son. This was once yours, I say. Look at the food in the kitchen. Look at the Seder plate on the piano. This could have been our home. I mean it was our home. But listen to this name. Look at that man with his beard like steel wool. Why did you want us to turn away from all this?
My mother again says nothing. She sits me down on the couch at the center of the room and my horde of new aunts and cousins come round one by one to offer their congratulations and offer their finger for my son to hold. As she leaves she turns to me, fixing her apron before she prepares to go back to the kitchen.
You two are such a blessing. We are so lucky. There again is her trademark sincerity. This time I don’t mind it. In fact I love it, so much so that I feel the urge to chase after her and ask her to say it again. But I am ensnared in the great web of my new family and I find myself stuck to the couch, beset by questions.
When do you have to go back?
Is there a train soon? Will you have to get going?
Aren’t you supposed to be off jetting around the world?
Our great famous writer!
It’s going to be months until you see him! He’s going to have grown so much.
Famous writer? What do you mean famous writer?
Well relatively speaking, darling. There are no “famous” writers. You know that.
What about my office, though? The membership? I’m looking for a house? Again they say nothing and Isaac begins to squirm in my arms. Didn’t you hear what they said when I came in? My heart feels as though it is choking itself as it begins to beat faster. I’m the big family success.
They all laugh and Isaac begins to cry.
Let your wife take him. My grandfather is standing over me now, staring at me from behind the couch. I hand the baby off to her and my grandfather takes me to get a glass of wine from the kitchen. The pieces of crystalware he brings us look like bowls on stilts, and the wine sloshes in their wide mouths as he walks one over to me. His lips are already the color of eggplant, and he gives a quiet l’chaim.
Are they right? I thought I was some kind of businessman. I’m a writer?
Why do you have to just be one or the other?
But what do I do for a living? Do I really write? And I can still have all this?
Is there any part of you that believes that’s really possible? His face is, in spite of the lips, sober, almost defeated, as though I have committed some great failure of imagination.
Well it’s nice to see you.
I’m flattered you took the time. The details seem off, though. My voice was never this deep.
I just imagined it would be.
Well now it is so. And you’re our big businessman.
I never thought that would happen.
There was a time when you thought that it might.
I shrugged.
But now you’ve got it all.
Is that sarcastic?
He shrugged back.
What’s sarcastic? You’ve got that beautiful wife in there. You’ve got that son who I’m sure you’re going to make into a little yeshiva bocher. You’re going to have a big house. You’ve done the impossible. You’ve returned to the past and made it new. What’s sarcastic?
You know everyone else seems happy for me. Why are you fighting me?
Who’s fighting, Michael? You get the final say here.
Have you ever seen Mom so happy with me?
Your mother is always happy with you.
Not so.
You don’t understand what happiness means for a parent so of course you think “not so.”
You don’t think she’s happy I finally made this choice? How could it make anybody happy to see a son throw all your work away? And it’s your work too. All the attempts to assimilate, to make it, to be comfortable. Are you telling me it would make you glad to see me throw it away?
She’s happy when you make a choice. She never made any choices. I never made any choices. The only choice anyone ever made was my father’s choice to leave Russia. And trust me that wasn’t much of a choice either. The only work anyone ever did was to get to the point where somebody could make a choice. You really think you’re making her happy if you pass that decision down the line?
So you’re saying I’m not allowed to want this?
You can want whatever you’d like if you decide it’s what’s best. I just don’t understand why you’d come back here. All the places in the world—in your mind!—and this is the best you can do? I guess I was just hoping you’d want more than this. Don’t you want to think a little bit bigger?
So you’re telling me I should stop? That I should cancel the show and go back to my bed, to the years I’ve laid out for myself, the poverty, the uncertainty?
Son, no one’s telling you anything. That’s what I’m telling you. It’s time to grow up.
When I wake up, the movie’s credits are rolling at the topmost corner of the screen. In fifteen seconds a new movie will start. Outside the window, the sun is at an indeterminable position. Light creeps in through the window, ambiguous, either nascent dawn or urban glow. I do not try to find it out which. I do not look at the clock. I look at my wall without focusing on anything, including the wall. For a moment, I am nothing more than a set of eyes looking: I am the bare minimum of a person, looking without thought, seeing without memory, half asleep in the early hours of the Sabbath.
// AJ STOUGHTON is a senior in Columbia College. He can be reached at [email protected].